A content management system (e.g., a web content management system) may include the ability to identify and deliver the appropriate presentation for web content that a visitor of the associated website/webpage has requested. This may be easier for an individual piece of content; however, websites typically utilize several different views of the same content (e.g., depending on the visitor's location and context within the website). For example, the home page of a news website may have top news stories portrayed in a manner to grab a visitor's attention, such as an image, a headline, and then a summary or the start of the news item itself. In the example, if the visitor navigates deeper into the website, the same article may appear (often in multiple places) in a more succinct manner (e.g., within lists or indexes of content for that particular section/topic/category). In the example, the same news article may simply be listed with a title and short description, or just a title. If the visitor selects that news item, they may be taken to the individual article where it may be seen in full.
These different views may show the same content, but may all be different views or aspects of the same item (e.g., showing just a subset of the elements that make up the full item, while in many cases also including additional elements that may not be thought of as part of the original article). For instance, the summary in the above example may be used only in a “top news stories” list on the home page, but not shown elsewhere or even in the article itself.
These goals may be accomplished within most web content management systems by modeling the different types of content items required and by developing multiple “views” or presentation templates (e.g., markup like HTML or a server-side script like JSP which may be resolved to HTML) that may be applied to each content type. Multiple presentation templates may then be built to dynamically present the various views required for each content type, e.g., a news article may require a feature view, a summary view, a short link view, and a full view all to be built. Having too many different presentation components (views) built to handle the display of different content types within different contexts may result in extra effort to maintain the web content management system.